Month: July 2011

Yes, it’s yet another top 100 list. This time from World Book Night, who got the country talking books back earlier this year. WBN has asked all its users of the website to nominate their top ten books and they’re compiling the top 100 to inform them on the choice of the 25 books for World Book Night 2012.

Here’s the list as it stands yesterday – it’s still evolving – but I wouldn’t think there will be much change above the bottom reaches of the chart. There’s still time to vote if you register.

The number of votes each book has received is in brackets and I’ve lined through all those I’ve read which was a surprising 59:

What stands out? Neil Gaiman has 5 entries! Apart from that it’s a fairly conventional mix of classics, modern classics, a few children’s classics and lots of more recent bestsellers of varying degrees of literaryness.

The other surprising thing was that none of my personal top 10 that I entered are there! They are mostly from my Desert Island Books list (see the tab at the top of the page), but in no particular order they are (today):

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick De Witt – still the best thing I’ve read this year (review here)

After reading Simon’s post on the wonderful book of essay about books by Anne Fadiman called Ex Libris yesterday, I spotted this little book about books lurking in my TBR. Zaid is Mexican, (I don’t think I’ve ever read anything by a Mexican before). His 2004 collection of articles/short essays mainly concern the business of books – Why are there so many?, How do booksellers choose their stock?, Is the book dead?, What are book’s natural audiences? All these and many other questions are considered.

Near the front I came across a marvellous quotation from the Spanish philosopher Jose Gaos:

Every private library is a reading plan.

How true. Zaid also goes on to briefly look at the financial flip side of owning to many books, but we’ll, erm, skate over that!

This was a diverting book to dip into, but unlike Fadiman’s people-centered bookish essays, Zaid’s little volume was rather dry in comparison. At one point he says, “Books can be skimmed”, and he’s quite right as that’s what I did.

Conceived, so I’ve read, as a response to the Utopian and rose-tinted worlds of Swallows and Amazons, and in particular, Ballantyne’s Coral Island, Golding’s Lord of the Flies, published in 1954, is one of the most influential debut novels of the 20th Century.

I haven’t read it since my teens. With several decades of life’s experiences between these readings, its power to shock could only deepen second time around. It didn’t take long to realise that Golding’s dystopian vision of what happens when a group of boys end up marooned in paradise is no anthropological experiment – it happens in the real world too, wherever there is bullying and pressure to join a gang, at whatever age.

Right from the start you can sense that the group of boys is never going to remain one big happy family. Tall and blond, Ralph is elected leader. Jack, his rival, and top dog of a bunch of surviving choirboys, is initially placated by being made chief hunter, and the boys all work together happily for a while doing their allotted jobs. Ralph, Simon and his crew build shelters and look after the younger boys, Jack, Roger and the rest of his band keep the signal fire going and hunt. They maintain a sort of democracy through use of a conch shell – as the call to meetings, and speaker’s symbol. Now to Piggy – the fat, bespectacled boy; he is habitually lazy due to his asthma, and a natural whiner which sets him up as an outsider from the start. He is, however, shrewd, but it is only Ralph that listens to his advice.

They rub along together for a while, although the dark nights are full of nightmares and the vision of a Beast that starts to ramp up the tension between the boys. But it is when Jack’s crew lets the fire go out as they’re having too much fun going native and hunting for pigs, that the rot really sets in. Soon the boys split into two tribes and Jack sets himself up as a demigod in Conrad’s Kurtz mode (cf Heart of Darkness). It will all end in tragedy, and the two seconds, Simon and Roger, will come to represent the axes of good and evil on the island in a near religious sense. After all the violence, the concluding three pages came as even more of a shock, paralleling the boys’ experiences on the tiny island with the war that’s been going on around them.

In writing his antidote to boyish adventures with happy endings, Golding even goes so far as to name his two leaders Ralph and Jack, the same as two of the three marooned boys who have such good fun in Coral Island. Ballantyne’s book is, however, aimed at younger readers who would not be ready for the gruesome entropy that ensues on Golding’s island. And it all starts off so innocently …

The fair boy began to pick his way as casually as possible towards the water. He tried to be offhand and not too obviously uninterested, but the fat boy hurried after him.
‘Aren’t there any grown-ups at all?’
‘I don’t think so.’
The fair boy said this solemnly; but then the delight of a realized ambition came over him. In the middle of the scar he stood on his head and grinned at the reversed fat boy.
‘No grown ups!’

I read this novel for our book group’s August discussion on dystopias. More on that to follow next month.

If you’ve never read this book I’d urge you to give it a go, and if, like me, you read it years and years ago – why not see how you feel on a re-read. Golding’s writing is amazing in his descriptions of this tropical paradise turned into hell; he also really understands boys and their need for authority figures. (10/10)

For most of us, Simenon is famous, justly, for his creation of Maigret, the pipe-smoking French detective that appeared in over a hundred novels and short stories from the 1930s to early 70s. The Maigret novels are light and the detective is a delight, but Simenon also wrote many other novels that are very different in tone – La neige était sale – Dirty Snow (1948) being one of them.

Dirty Snow was written in the USA after Simenon had left France in 1945 where he was under some suspicion for being a collaborator, having negotiated German film rights during the occupation. His observations of living in occupied France obviously influenced the writing of this novel which is set in an unspecified occupied country – it could be France, it could be Germany itself…

Dirty Snow is the story of one young man’s fall. Frank Friedmaier is nineteen. Fatherless, he lives with his mother Lotte who runs a whorehouse in an apartment block, tolerated by the other residents as she caters mainly to the town’s oppressors which keeps the attention away from them. Frank is itching to show that he can play with the big boys at Timo’s – the bar they all frequent. He decides it’s time to make his first kill …

And for Frank, who was nineteen, to kill his first man was another loss of viriginity hardly more disturbing than the first. And, like the first, it wasn’t premeditated. It just happened. As though a moment comes when it’s both necessary and natural to make a decision that has long since been made.
No one had pushed him to do it. No one had laughed at him. Besides, only fools let themselves be influenced by their friends.
For weeks, perhaps months, he had kept saying to himself, because he had felt within himself a sort of inferiority. ‘I’ll have to try …’
Not in a fight. That would have been against his nature. To have it count, it seemed to him, it would have to be done in cold blood.

And so by page four we know where we are with Frank. He chooses and kills his prey, but tellingly, also allows himself to be seen in the locality by Holst, a neighbour. However, he intuitively senses that Holst won’t tell. Blooded and with a gun in his pocket, Frank becomes fearless, but it is one callous and totally despicable act that I won’t say any more about, that will make him feared and lead to his downfall.

The second half of the book follows Frank’s few weeks under interrogation. Yes, he was caught – hoorah! After an initial beating, the interrogation is carried out by an old gentleman who takes his time with Frank to winkle out every single thing he knows about all of the people in his life, playing mind games with him, never telling him what he was arrested for. The sleep-deprived and starving Frank remains strong, determined to make it last as long as possible until the day he’s ready.

Told entirely from Frank’s perspective, this novel is really bleak. He is an amoral piece of scum; friendless, increasingly cold and emotionless. In the nurture versus nature debate, undoubtedly, his lack of a father figure in his life, and his over-protective mother have both helped to make him what he becomes.

Simenon takes us down all the way with Frank, but allows him one little glimpse of what could have been, before he meets his end. Maybe writing the book in the sunshine of Tucson, Arizona, Simenon needed to come up for air before ending it. I amongst others, (see Lizzies Literary Life review here), would have preferred that he stayed down – Frank didn’t deserve it.

The afterword by William T Vollmann was interesting – after positioning Dirty Snow as ultimate noir more akin to Chekov than Chandler, he compares Frank to characters in Middlemarch by George Eliot – in their failure to meet their potential – which was surprising, yet I could sort of see the sense in it. Personally, I was reminded throughout by Pinkie in Brighton Rock by Graham Greene – another very nasty young man, (and due for a re-read). The book also brought to mind Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada which I read earlier this year and reviewed here in terms of the sense of living under suspicion.

The Maigret books, yet wonderful, are as a mere bagatelle in comparison with this look into the abyss from Simenon. (10/10)

I’ve always loved comics and magazines. I remember looking forward to getting rolls of comics wrapped in brown paper from my Grandma – classic comics for girls of the 60s like Bunty, Mandy and Twinkle. I particularly loved Bunty, as it had a cut-out doll with wardrobe on the back page which I religiously snipped out each issue. My brother got Whizzer and Chips, Topper and Beezer.

Then in the 70s I graduated to the wonderful Jackie. We all read it, we all put up the posters, were educated by the Cathy and Claire problem pages, and sniggered over the photo stories.

It was simply the best teen comic out there. There were flirtations with Fab 208 (the magazine of Radio Luxembourg – better quality paper for glossy posters), and Smash Hits, but until I was old enough for the young adult mag Honey, Jackie was the must have.

At university, I got overtaken by science fiction and prog rock, and instead of having posters of David Bowie et al, it was more likely to be the alien landscapes and spaceships of Roger Dean that graced my walls, many of them cut out of Omni magazine, a US science and science fiction magazine that was, believe it or not, published by Penthouse! There was no smut involved, just wonderful art, some brilliant SF short stories and speculative technology of the sort that’s in Wired these days.

Once working, I turned to the women’s monthlies, Cosmo, Company and the like in my late 20s into 30s, then graduated to Marie Claire, and later even Good Housekeeping alongside a whole raft of interior design mags – Homes & GardensHouse Beautiful and the ilk, my favourite being Living etc.

Alongside those, I was still interested in music and movies, and thank goodness for Q and Empire respectively which debuted in the late 1980s. I graduated, along with Q’s editors (Mark Ellen and David Hepworth), to Mojo as my musical tastes matured, and Empire I’ve never left.

But what magazines do I read now? Well, I’ve dropped all my subscriptions to the glossy monthlies and interior design mag having realised that the articles and trends just go round in circles and I’ve now seen and read them all before! I’ll still buy one or two of them for a journey or holiday, but no longer feel the need to read them every month. I do however, still read these few:

The Word (again I jumped ship with Mark Ellen and David Hepworth) to this fab mag for grown-ups about music, films, tv, and a few books.

I still read Empire

The Literary Review, plus Waterstones quarterly (although this is on hold with the new ownership).

plus an assortment of occasional literary quarterlies like The Reader and Slightly Foxed

Pre-blog, back in 2006, we read The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov in our book group and I loved it. This novel about the devil coming to a town of non-believers in 1930s Russia and spreading mischief paralleled against the a writer in mental hospital who has written a Pilate’s eye view of Jesus is a delicious satire on Stalinism and the repression of religion and art. It wasn’t an easy book to get into – I’d previously tried to read it and failed, but this time it did click with me and I loved it.

The Master and Margarita, not published in his lifetime, is arguably Bulgakov’s masterpiece, but when I came across a new translation by Roger Cockrell of one of his earlier novellas written in the mid-1920s, I had to give that a go. The Fatal Eggs was originally published in the West in a collection of novellas called Diaboliad.

Bulgakov was a fan of HG Wells, and this novella owes much to Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau amongst others, which involved a mad scientist doing experiments on animals.

Set in 1928 – just into the future at the time of writing, Bulgakov’s Professor Persikov is a classic mad scientist. The ageing academic is consumed by his passion for zoology, and amphibians in particular. He is a difficult man, and makes the lives of those around him hell, including his assistant Pankrat, and all the students he teaches in Moscow whom he persistently fails in their exams.

One day he makes an accidental discovery after having left a microscope on; when he returns the combination of light and lenses has created a red ray which focused on the amoeba under the scope has accelerated their growth immensely. He builds a larger apparatus, and tries it out with similar success on his beloved frogs.

At the same time as Persikov’s discovery, and unbeknown to him, a fatal disease is rampaging its way through Russia’s poutry stock, and all chickens have had to be destroyed. Persikov’s invention by this time has come to the attention of journalists and the secret police – who step in to confiscate his large machines, planning to use them to speedgrow new chickens – but there’s a mix-up with the eggs, and as you might guess, things are going to go badly wrong!

Mad professors, bungling secret agents and mob rule make a heady mix for some broad comedy and swipes at all things red and Russian – nothing escapes his satiric pen, although I’m no expert in the October revolution and what came after it. The ending of this novella is somewhat weak, using a conveniently Wellsian construct that I won’t divulge to save spoiling the plot for anyone else that wants to read it – however, getting there is rather fun, and I’m keen to read more of his other works.

The extra material was also very well worth reading. In the introduction we meet Bulgakov, and find out about his influences and some of the references in this novella. After the story, we get the translators notes which include explanations of the puns in the text, and lastly a thirty page biography and survey of Bulgakov’s work. Bulgakov died young at 48 in 1940, and it was thanks to his third wife’s efforts after his death that we got to read his works in the West, although it took until the early 1970s for the first uncensored translations to appear.

In today’s Miscellany…

A visit from the Fairy Hobmother

A funny nearly literary moment from my Dorset holiday

And the latest book arrivals at Gaskell Towers.

* * * * *

Firstly, I had a lovely surprise e-mail whilst I was on holiday. It was from the Fairy Hobmother who granted my wish when I commented on my friend Ali’s blog. I asked for some new knives – and this lovely new set arrived within days. Thank you very much Fairy Hobmother!

Actually the Fairy Hobmother is a nice chap called David at Appliances Online, and he travels around blogs in the UK granting wishes. What a nice job to have!

If any of you have any kitchen related wishes, do leave a comment below, because he might then visit you too …

* * * * *

I spent last week on holiday in Dorset, based at West Bay – the harbour of Bridport, a little town ten miles east of Lyme Regis.

Notably missing from my Dorset literary canon was Thomas Hardy of course, and on our last day on the way back from sandcastle-building at Weymouth, I saw a sign to the ‘Hardy Monument’.

A couple of miles up the winding country road to the hilltop, and we reached this… It was shrouded in scaffolding and the site was completely closed – a shame as the view from the top would have been marvellous.

When we got home, I looked it up on Wikipedia – and discovered that I’d got the wrong Hardy!

The Hardy Monument was erected in memory of Vice Admiral Sir Thomas Hardy – he of ‘Kiss me Hardy,’ reputedly said by Nelson as he lay dying at the Battle of Trafalgar.

Oh Well…

* * * * *

And finally, a selection of the latest additions to my TBR piles.

Doc by Mary Doria Russell. Given my current love of westerns, I couldn’t resist ordering this one from the US once I read Teresa’s post at Shelf Love on Russell and her new novel about Doc Holliday.

… and finally The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell – in a signed, numbered edition of the paperback given to the first 500 subscribers to a new quarterly books magazine called We love this book. The mag is rather good too – you may be able to pick up a free copy in indie/specialist bookshops.

There is a lot of love out there for this novel. Despite the hype though, given the type of psychological thriller that it is, it was always going to be a book I’d read anyway.

Christine wakes every morning to a man and house she can’t remember. After a horrific car crash she has severe amnesia, but she is unable to make new memories too; as she sleeps her brain wipes her experiences from that day clear away. Each morning she has to find herself again – her memory stops in her twenties, but she is now 47. She meets her long-suffering husband Ben who says he still loves her anew, and has to be told about her life yet again, piecing together enough to get her through the day.

Christine is, unknown to Ben who would be against it, secretly seeing a doctor who thinks he can help her with her memory loss. Dr Nash asks her to keep a secret journal, and rings her each day to tell her about the book’s existence. Thus Christine begins to piece together bits of her life that she can’t remember and Ben doesn’t seem to want to tell her about – which is understandable as he has to do this every day after all. Doing this does start memory fragments appearing now and then, they raise so many questions, and Christine gradually starts to uncover the nasty truth about what really happened to her …

That’s enough of the plot, except to say that it kept me guessing for ages, and the sudden realisation of what was going to happen in the end sent a cold chill through me! It kept me reading compulsively; if I’d been able to, I would have read it through in one session, but normal life intervened, but I was itching all that time to finish the book.

If I had one criticism, it is that Christine’s journal entries are over-detailed. She wouldn’t have had enough time to read the ever-expanding book every day and to add to it in the time available. The gradual reveal through her journal entries was brilliantly handled though and as each new fact is uncovered, it makes the reader re-evaluate what they thought they knew – we’re with Christine in this voyage of discovery. There is a certain amount of reiteration, especially in the first half of the book, but like in the film Groundhog Day, (the only similarity!), each day is actually not quite the same as the one before.

There are no author photos on the sleeve of this book, and the initials also give nothing away. I was really surprised to find that SJ is a bloke, as most of the psychological thrillers I’ve read have been by women; he captures Christine’s daily panic and increasing furtiveness really well. Christine’s waking up each morning feeling twenty-something and being confronted with an older body in the mirror makes us sympathize with her instantly (don’t we all secretly believe we’re still that young!).

I really enjoyed this gripping psychological thriller, and it will be fascinating to see what Ridley Scott makes of it – he’s bought the film rights. (9/10)

Scene: New York City, 1966 – an elderly couple, Katey and Val, are at a gallery viewing of photographs, all taken of passengers on the subway over many years. The same man occurs in two photos, but in obviously different circumstances years apart. Katey recognises him – it’s Tinker Grey… which takes her back to New Year’s Eve 1937 and the first time she met him.

Katey is a New Yorker, born of Russian stock, and just at the beginning of her career – starting out as a secretary and rooming at Mrs Martindale’s boarding house with her roommate Eve. Eve is blonde and from Iowa, moved to the city to find fame and fortune. New Year’s Eve 1937 sees them in a jazz club down to their last nickels when a tall striking man in a cashmere coat walks in the door. Eve bags him and thus the girls meet Theodore ‘Tinker’ Grey and one of the seminal years of Kate’s life will begin.

Although Eve ends up with Tinker, you constantly get the feeling that he’d rather be with Katey; but after a car crash a few weeks later in which Tinker was driving and Eve was injured, he felt his duty was to look after Eve. We follow this year of ups and downs with all three of them, through Katey’s eyes. Katey is the archetypal good girl made good – we see her elevated from the typing pool to Editor’s assistant, she’s not afraid to work hard, and is well read. Katey is not averse to having fun though, and with Tinker off limits, she nearly finds love with the lovely Wallace Wolcott. He may have New England money, but he needs a real purpose in life and leaves to go fight in Spain. Meanwhile Tinker and Eve are doing their best impressions of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald in Europe. Katey remains puzzled by Tinker though – there are things about him that don’t ring true, and it will take the end of Eve and his relationship, and some hard truths that Katey discovers to find out the truth at the end of the year.

Maybe it’s because New Yorkers appear to live and work in a totally faster gear to the rest of us, but it felt as if there was a lifetime crammed into this novel – but what a life! The period setting was irresistible to me, full of jazz, cocktails and parties. Katey and Eve may have done well to land in the set with which they mix, but Katey never forgets where she comes from, having her feet firmly on the ground – well, for most of the time. Seeing it all through her eyes shows the others’ bad behaviour for what it was, but I almost shed a tear for poor Wallace though, who hadn’t a single bad bone in his body.

This novel had more than a hint of Mad Men about it for me, done Great Gatsby style. Katey reminded me very much of Peggy Olsen in the TV series, whereas Tinker and Eve could have been Dick Diver and Nicole from Tender is the Night – doomed from the start. Hearing the story from Eve’s point of view would have been terribly different and frankly boring; Katey is by far the more interesting character, and her story makes for a fine debut novel indeed. (9/10)

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About me

Annabel Gaskell - booklover and lifelong reader and Co-founder/ Fiction Editor of Shiny New Books. I'm also a Mum, materials scientist and school Lab Technician living near Oxford. I answer to 'Gaskella' too, the former name of my blog. See my 'Info & Stuff' tab for more. Contact me: annabookbel at gmail dot com